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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778934">Remainder</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry'>Poetry</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dæmorphing [24]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Hork-Bajir, POV Minor Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 11:00:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,058</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778934</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that Nora knows the truth about her stepson Marco, she has so many more pieces of the puzzle. But she still can't make it all add up to a family.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dæmorphing [24]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/8983</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>110</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Remainder</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Sometimes I have feelings about minor characters. This fic spans from "Welcome Home" through "The Cost of the Fight."</p><p>Attributions for the banner: the Courier Prime font is by Alan Dague-Greene.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>Nora had never liked camping.</p><p>She was always a neat person. She hated having to get up in the middle of the night when it was raining, and the wind was howling, to walk through the mud to the composting toilet. She hated how Euclid’s paws would get stained brown with mud.</p><p>One of her first nights in the valley, she got up to use the toilet. It wasn’t raining, but in the middle of the night she heard animalistic screams and struggles. Nothing human, nothing animal, nothing from this earth. She went running into the yurt and found Peter. She shook him awake and gasped and trembled. Euclid whined and hid under the bed. “What is that?” she whispered.</p><p>“What’s what?” Peter started to mumble. As he came awake, he heard the sound too, and clutched at her. “Ah – um – let’s ask Marco.”</p><p>Nora had always liked Marco from afar, the way you like the class clown in your school who would never look twice at you, or a funny celebrity. She admired his resilience and humor, but knew that she would never really get close. He wouldn’t allow her to. Now she had some inkling of why. She hated to wake him up; he never seemed to get enough sleep, always some shade of gray beneath the brown of his skin.</p><p>“Marco? Do you hear that? What’s going on?” Peter said quietly. Mirazai was red and yellow with alarm inside her tank.</p><p>Marco came awake so suddenly, it was like an incandescent light coming on, blindingly bright. Diamanta came loose from around his neck and reared up, ready to strike. “What? What’s going on?” Marco said, instantly alert, looking around.</p><p>“What’s that noise?”</p><p>“Oh. Oh, that. Don’t worry about that. That’s one of Toby’s raids.”</p><p>“What? One of – Toby – that’s the leader alien, right?”</p><p>“Hah. Yeah. That’s the boss alien in charge. Her people, the Hork-Bajir, they’re slaves of the Yeerks. She leads the warriors out on raids to free them. When they come back, and they scream and struggle like that, that’s the Yeerks in their heads trying to get out. They won’t. Trust me. The screaming will be over soon.”</p><p>“What, they torture them? What are they doing?”</p><p>Marco gave his father a flat look. “Starving them out. Or, well, I don’t know exactly what she does, but I assume she’s starving them out. That’s what we did when Jake was taken prisoner.”</p><p>“Jake was –”</p><p>“Yeah. Not a nice story. But it’s what we have to do when someone’s taken. It’s the only way to be sure. Unless you can convince the Yeerk to leave on their own, but that’s not exactly easy.”</p><p>“So that’s how all of them got free? Screaming like that?”</p><p>“Well, most of them. Jara and Ket managed to escape without their Yeerks – it’s complicated. And then there’s ones who were born free, like Toby. But most of them, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “So, uh. Can I go back to sleep now? Didn’t really get my beauty sleep last night.”</p><p>“How can you sleep with noise like that?” Nora said, holding Euclid in her arms.</p><p>Marco shrugged. “I’ve slept through worse. You’ll get used to it.”</p><p>Nora didn’t really want to get used to it, but maybe she didn’t have a choice.</p><p> </p><p>Living in the valley was horrible and scary sometimes, but what really got to Nora after a while was the boredom. She did everything she could to help. She cooked sometimes for the humans in the valley. She helped organize the pantry, but she felt like the others were humoring her when they let her do that. She’d help keep the fire burning in the fire pit, find kindling and stoke it. She wasn’t really the best at that.</p><p>When she mentioned being bored to Robin – one of the people who’d been in the valley longer, one of those strange people who seemed to be sympathetic to the Yeerks, terrible brain slugs who’d taken Eva away and ruined Peter’s life and so many others’ – he said, “Try talking to the Hork-Bajir. They’re interesting. They’ve always got something to do.”</p><p>“Aren’t they, um – I mean, they don’t seem to speak English so well.”</p><p>“Eh, they can get along,” Robin said. “Give it a try. You’re a teacher, right? You might like Kam Jedet, one of the teachers here in the valley. See what he has to say.”</p><p>It could be hard to find the Hork-Bajir sometimes. They were always up in the trees. Nora had never been bad at climbing trees as a kid, but when Euclid settled as a poodle, that made it a little harder – she got slowed down by having to carry him in one arm. So really, what she could manage were low branches, leaving Euclid on the ground straining at the edges of their limit.</p><p>Eventually, she did find a Hork-Bajir teaching a group of their children. The children were weirdly cute compared to the terrifying adults. Their blades were stubby still, and didn’t look like they could cut anything. They were clumsy and uncoordinated in that charming way of all young things, human or animal, stumbling over their own tails. They were already better in the trees than Nora could ever be, even if Euclid had been one of the most nimble of animals. Nora couldn’t understand most of the lesson, but she caught the words “good touch” and “wrong touch.” <em>What was that about?</em> she wondered silently to Euclid.</p><p>When the lesson was over, she went up to the teacher. She said, “Are you Kam Jedet?”</p><p>He – Robin had said he, right? – said, “Yes,” in that deep gravelly voice all Hork-Bajir seemed to have.</p><p>“You’re a teacher,” Nora said.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“I’m a teacher, too,” said Nora.</p><p>“Ah,” said Kam.</p><p>“What were you teaching the children just then?”</p><p>“Freedom lessons,” Kam said.</p><p>“What are freedom lessons? That’s not a subject I’ve ever taught.”</p><p>Kam looked surprised. “No freedom lessons?” He blinked. “Ah. Humans are free. Not like Hork-Bajir. No freedom lessons.”</p><p>“Lessons on… how to be free?” Nora said.</p><p>Kam swung down from the tree, which spared Nora from having to crane her neck up to look at him. “Yes,” Kam said. “Yeerk teach Hork-Bajir how to be slave. Say yes to Yeerk in head. Be slave. Do not try for free. Hork-Bajir learn how to be free. Good touch, no wrong touch. Listen to head. Listen to hearts. Know what Hork-Bajir want.”</p><p>“I think I get it,” Nora said. “Maybe. It seems important. I don’t really know how to teach freedom lessons, but I taught math, before I came here. For human children.”</p><p>“Math?” said Kam.</p><p><em>Oh boy,</em> Nora thought, giving Euclid a look.</p><p>He gave an encouraging yip. <em>Go on.</em></p><p><em>“</em>You know, how to work with numbers. How to count, add, subtract, multiply, divide.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Kam. “Yes. Numbers. Important. Kam not know much of numbers. Nora want teaching?”</p><p><em>This is insane,</em> Nora thought to Euclid. She almost imagined that in Marco’s voice. <em>Am I really offering to teach math to alien kids right now?</em></p><p>Euclid said, <em>The kids are getting freedom lessons. They need math, too. That’s how you build a free society, how you manage your resources. How you know what you have and what you don’t.<br/>
</em></p><p>“How much English do the kids speak? I don’t know your language.”</p><p>“Bek Mashar teach English. Watch Bek teach. Learn how Hork-Bajir learn English,” said Kam.</p><p>“Okay,” Nora said. It only made sense that she’d have to do shadowing again, to learn again how to be a teacher. “Okay. I’ll follow him and see what he does.”</p><p> </p><p>After her math lessons, students liked to stick around and ask her questions. Some of them just asked about humans and what they were like. Some of them asked questions about other subjects. Some of them became interested in some version of engineering or science – she often didn’t know the answer to those questions. She wished she had access to a library, a computer, anything to satisfy their endless curiosity. Sometimes they asked personal questions and often she would say, “That’s private,” and they respected that, because they learned to in their freedom lessons. Nora came to appreciate those more and more every day.</p><p>Today, little Franaj, Toby Hamee’s little brother, stuck around to ask questions. He asked, “Nora has baby? Like Jara and Ket have Franaj?”</p><p>Nora’s heart ached. Euclid whined and licked at her hand. “Sort of,” she managed to say. “My husband Peter has a son, Marco. He’s one of the Animorphs. He’s not really my baby, but my husband loves him, so I feel a sort of – connection.”</p><p>“Hearts family important like egg family,” said Franaj. “Kam say in freedom lessons.”</p><p>“Yes, of course. That’s right,” said Nora.</p><p>“Nora has baby Marco,” said Franaj.</p><p>Nora shook her head. “Not really. Your sister Toby – she has parents, your parents Jara and Ket, but she’s not their baby.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Franaj. “Toby is grown up.”</p><p>The way she heard Marco and the others talk, Toby was born in this valley only a couple of years ago. She was far too young to be grown up. But then again, Marco was far too young to be grown up, and he was nearly sixteen.</p><p>“Sixteen in a few days, right?” Euclid said quietly. He was right. What were they going to do to mark his birthday in a place like this? She’d have to talk to Peter about it.</p><p>“Right,” Nora said. “Toby is a grown up. So is Marco, but their parents can still worry about them too.”</p><p>Nora did worry about Marco, but he would have hated to hear that, if she had ever said it out loud.</p><p> </p><p>It wasn’t much of a birthday party. Nora might have forgotten about it completely if it weren’t for Melissa, who kept track of the dates in a notebook of hers. The rest of them didn’t exactly have calendars or computers or contact with the outside world, so how would they know? Certainly Marco himself didn’t seem to know it was his birthday.</p><p>Nora tried to bring it up with Peter. He’d been busy, spending hours away from the valley. At first he didn’t want to talk about what he was doing. Finally, he admitted, “I’ve been working on a Yeerk Pool.”</p><p>“You’ve been working on a <em>what</em>?” Nora said.</p><p>“Estrid has to test the virus before we use it. We’re going to have to – keep Yeerks. For her to test on,” he bit out.</p><p>Nora thought about that for a second. It wasn’t a nice thing to think about. “They’re our enemies,” Euclid said, as much to convince her as anyone else.</p><p>“Yeah,” said Peter, looking down at his hands. “Sure.”</p><p>“It’s Marco’s sixteenth birthday tomorrow,” Nora said. “Should we do something? I feel like we should.”</p><p>Peter laughed hollowly. “What could we possibly do? It’s not like he can take the day off.”</p><p>“We could give him something nice?”</p><p>“Bake a cake? We barely have enough supplies as it is, with all the morphers doing supply runs.”</p><p>“I can ask the children if they know about any berries we can pick.”</p><p>“All right,” said Peter. “I guess that’s the best we can do.”</p><p>“We’ll go berry-picking in the evening, then. When you’re done with… work.” Of course, Nora had work too, teaching children, but she figured she found it a lot more comforting than Peter found his.</p><p>Marco ended up having to leave early on his birthday to go to Sacramento – something to do with the governor. “Well, at least they’re finally telling the authorities about all of it,” Nora said.</p><p>“Yeah. If Governor Hernandez is still, you know, free,” said Peter.</p><p>When Marco got back to the valley, late that same night, he was shaking with exhaustion. Nora and Peter decided they’d only be tormenting him more to make him go through with some kind of birthday ceremony, so they saved the berries for breakfast when he woke up. “Hey,” said Peter, putting the bowl in his hands as soon as he was awake enough to take it. “Happy sweet sixteen, Marco.”</p><p>Marco rolled his eyes. “Sweet sixteen is for <em>girls</em>, Dad,” he complained. But he ate the berries anyway.</p><p>Neither of them ever told him it was Nora who’d picked them.</p>
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